Publisher's Synopsis
When civil war erupted after the partition of India and the creation of the new Islamic State of Pakistan, Wilfrid Russell was one of four managing directors in charge of fourteen cement factories. These factories were now in two separate countries, the workers comprising a mixture of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Wilfrid promptly chartered a Dakota with its crew and flew it himself for a week, transferring Muslim employees from India to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs from the Pakistan factories to India. On the last flight from Pakistan, Wilfrid and his crew flew his wife Sheila and his mother-in-law Mrs Amy Sawhny to safety. They had been holidaying in the Sawhny mountain chalet at Gulmarg. These pages record the mixed marriage of Sheila's mother and father in 1904, when she eloped by climbing over the wall of Government House in Lahore where she had been working for several months as Nanny, to marry Sheila's barrister father. This book contains much recent history and the atmosphere of four countries -- India, England, America and France. The silken thread connecting them is The White Sari of Sheila Edwardes Russell. Wifred's commitment to the country increased dramatically when the war came, when he was called up, having been in the Cambridge University Air Squadron before the war. Because of his knowledge of things Indian, the RAF sensibly asked him to instruct young Indians to fly, ultimately to fight the Japanese. Wilfrid was an intensely social person and in India in the 1930s he was well known on the party circuit. Although he was very traditional in his views, he mixed with a broad range of Indians - Hindus, Muslims, Parsees and Sikhs. This openness was not a common feature amongst his contemporaries and led him to become a Member of Parliament for Bombay in one of the colonial power's experiments with limited home rule prior to Independence. This is the author's memorial to his wife, Sheila, who was a truly exceptional person. Sheila Sawhny was born in Rawalpindi (then part of India) on 18th December 1920. She died aged eighty-three in the village of Rock on the North Coast of Cornwall. This book recalls their long shared life and their many friends. Joanna Lumley has written the foreword. Her grandfather, Colonel Weir, was the first Resident, representing the British government of India to the Dalai Llama at Lhasa, also the Kings of Bhutan and Nepal. Her grandmother was the first white woman in that remote country. The Weirs owned the mountain chalet in Gulmarg next door to that of the Sawhny family, so the two families and the author have been friends for three generations.
